Gun lovers are pretending that assault rifles are just like hunting rifles yet
their own publications say otherwise. Not mention these same people claiming
there is no difference are paying 5 -10 times as much for the assault
"tactical" type rifle. What for then?

The are dozens of
publications dedicated to assault type "tactical" weapons that go into
great detail of the nuances of those types of weapons. A hunting rifle is great
for making 1 shot accurately.

You might want to use a tactical rifle
if you were hunting AN ENTIRE HERD of buffalo.

Banning a gun whose action is identical
to hundreds of others simply because liberals don't like its looks is not
only foolish, it's the perfect illustration of knee-jerk liberal politics
-- the elevation of sophomoric symbolism over substance.

This letter is the usual drivel from the Gun community. But he is right, the
Brady Bill was not nearly as effective as it should have been, saturated as it
was with loopholes and amendments that weakened it enough to gain passage. But,
that can not be an excuse for not passing effective assault weapons legislation,
or even a constitutional amendment if necessary. There can be no liberty without
life, and no happyness either.

Those that fight against reasonable
legislation to solve this horrendous problem, or bury their heads in the sand,
will have blood on their hands. There are sins of commision and sins of
ommission, but they are all sins just the same. So, pick your side. Are you for
life, or the for Gun Manufacturers and their syncophant the NRA? Are you on the
side of life, liberty, and happiness, or on the side of profit, because that is
what this fight is really all about. It's not really about civil rights as
those conspiring men would have us believe.

So 20 innocent children are slaughtered and three people on the Opinion page
respond by doubling down on their Rambo fantasies. Besides one's
insecurity, what legal reason is there to own an automatic weapon?

@KJB1. Because criminals will always get any kind of weapon they want! No law
will stop them, no law will protect you from them! The police can not protect
you either any more than the police protected those poor children in Ct. The
only security you and I have is to protect ourselves! That's why!

What is most frightening is that right now there are thousands of people
flocking into guns shops (which, by the way, outnumber the number of McDonalds
in America) to buy even more weapons of mass destruction for their personal
arsenals.

They are determined to make any future efforts to control
these dangerous and unnecessary weapons more difficult. But I guess that is the
aim of those who have overdosed on hate radio paranoia.

Even more
frightening is the question of when some of these people will be prodded by
their own mental problems and the rants they hear on hate stations into opening
fire on other Americans.

Larry Alan Burns, the federal district judge in San Diego who just last month
sentenced Tuscon shooter Jared Lee Loughner to seven consecutive life terms plus
140 years in federal prison, is no darling of the gun control movement.

Burns is a self-described conservative, appointed to the bench by President
George W. Bush, and he agrees with the Supreme Court's decision which held
that the 2nd Amendment gives Americans the right to own guns for self-defense.
He is also a gun owner.

But while sentencing Loughner in November,
Burns questioned the need for high-capacity magazines like the one Loughner had
in his Glock, and said he regretted how the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was
allowed to lapse in 2004. Reacting to last weeks mass shooting, , Burns called
for a new assault weapons ban with some teeth this time.

Ban the
manufacture, importation, sale, transfer and possession of both assault weapons
and high-capacity magazines, Burns wrote. Don';t let people who already
have them keep them. Don't let ones that have already been manufactured
stay on the market. I don't care whether its called gun control or a gun
ban. I'm for it."

The NRA. Their solution. Arm everyone, because we all have a target on our
back. Put cops in all schools. Wow! How about armed cops in every shopping
center, movie theaator, park, church, hospitals, gas stations, restaraunts,
office buildings. And to be sure we are safe arm every citizen with a 50 caliber
automatic weapaon or two. One could be mounted on our front port and another on
the back of our 4 wheel drive truck. No truck? Well to be safe you will just
have to buy one.

@ One old man. Rambo has nothing to do with this. Let me try to explain it
again. Not many years ago a man moved here from another state and broke into a
family's home and brutally murdered both parents with a hammer. He then
took the two kids to a remote area where he raped both of them for days and then
he murdered the young boy. He took the young girl to Coeur d'Alene to a
cafe where a waitress recognized the little girl and called police. That man
still sits in prison appealing his arrest. Now, it is highly possible that had
that father or mother had owned a gun, that family would not have been destroyed
by an evil man! I would do everything in my power to protect my family from this
ever happening to any of them. If you feel differently, that's up to you.
but for me, I will not, can not allow that to happen to my family.

Regardless of what propaganda wants you to believe, only
a very small fringe wants to ban all guns. If someone wants a rifle to hunt
with, fine. If someone wants a gun for self-defense, they should have that
right. What I'm talking about are the assault weapons that can fire twenty
bullets at the flick of a finger. What legal justification is there for needing
that?

I'm not claiming we can stop every gun-related crime,
but we can do a lot better than we have been. The gun-loving crowd's
response seems to be that we should just throw up our hands and arm everybody
because...I don't know. So they can go on feeling powerful, I guess?

Newtown has made it abundantly clear that doing nothing is no longer an
option. Something has to change.

Mountanman, I can see your point. But why would you need an assault type weapon
for this type protection? I know a lot of people just use them for fun, but why
is someone's fun more important than trying to stop, for example, a group
of 6 and 7 year olds from being shot 10 or 11 times each?

It is interesting that the left is readily drawing the correlation between the
shooting in Connecticut and Gun control.

My opinion is...lets study
the issue instead of proclaiming the problem as self-evident.

Let's commission a research group to study the actually efficacy of gun
control laws with all its contextual factors and determine if this is a wise
course of action.

Instead we are have discussions where inflammatory
phrases such as "colossal failure", "horrendous problem", "
blood on their hands", " innocent children are slaughtered",
"Rambo fantasies", "weapons of mass destruction", and "hate
radio paranoia".

Let's have the study and accept the
findings.

My guess is that those who use the inflammatory language
really don't care about the facts and are more emotion driven than logic
driven.

My daughter asked me if I thought it was safe at her high
school today...I replied that it was statistically safer than the drive to her
school.

And yet...I don't hear any of the people above that I
quoted using the same language in their comments about cars and
driving...Strange.

Studies won't satisfy those who oppose gun laws.
Those on the right can't even respect overwheming scientific studies on
climate change. They don't care about facts or reality. Otherwise your
suggestion might be a good one.

The Harvard Injury Control Research
Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s
substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds
true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states.

Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations
between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found
was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and
more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But
one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun
control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths.